The Superhero Next Door

By Jay McInerney

Published: November 7, 2004

I WAS one of those readers who cocked a skeptical eyebrow when the flying guy in the cape crashed down on the Brooklyn sidewalk in Jonathan Lethem's most recent novel, ''The Fortress of Solitude.'' Not that I'm prejudiced against superheroes in literary fiction: I'm a big fan of Rick Moody's work with the Fantastic Four in ''The Ice Storm,'' and my only gripe with Michael Chabon's ''Kavalier & Clay'' is that it is more DC Comics than Marvel -- faithful to its historical setting, I guess, but too black hat/white hat for my tastes. My ''Fortress of Solitude'' problem may have stemmed from the fact that Lethem's caped crusader and his magic ring appeared some 100 pages into the exuberant Brooklyn epic, by which time Lethem had established, I thought, an engaging mode of brownstone and bodega realism. Readers of Lethem's earlier work, including some of the stories collected in ''Men and Cartoons,'' may have been waiting all along for someone in ''The Fortress of Solitude'' to start leaping the semi-tall buildings of Gowanus. Most of these stories are quick to take to the air. ''When Super Goat Man moved into the commune on our street I was 10 years old,'' reads the first sentence in the strangely poignant penultimate story.

Before the autobiographical and historical impulse to recreate a recently lost Brooklyn took hold with ''The Fortress of Solitude,'' Lethem had built a substantial body of work appropriating and customizing genres, working changes on the conventions of sci-fi, the western and the academic comedy of manners -- sometimes all at once. His breakthrough novel, ''Motherless Brooklyn,'' played with detective fiction and film noir even as it edged closer to the quasi-autobiographical realism of its successor.

While some of Lethem's work -- like the story ''The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door'' -- seems as glib and tired as the word postmodernism itself, his best novels and stories are elevated by his ability to particularize his artificial landscapes and to humanize their inhabitants. For all his self-consciousness, he generally can't disguise his compassion for his creations. Lethem is, to borrow one of his favorite words, a lovable dystopianist. You sense that he wants to be liked as well as admired; he has the will and the ability to seduce and emotionally engage the reader even as he celebrates the artificiality of narrative conventions.

The opening story in this collection, ''The Vision,'' provides easy entry into Lethem's fictional world of superheroes, intergalactic detectives and talking livestock: it begins with the narrator's realization that his new next-door neighbor is a former fifth-grade classmate, Adam Cressner, a guy who used to come to school dressed up as a superhero named the Vision, a second-string character from Marvel's Avengers. The new homeowner now teaches at Columbia and has a girlfriend who sets the narrator's heart and groin aflutter. One night the couple invite him over for a cocktail party at which the guests play a parlor game called Mafia. He in turn proposes a more revealing ''Truth or Dare''-style game called ''I Never,'' in part to embarrass Adam by unmasking him as a former freaky superhero wannabe. The game backfires when a young woman the narrator is interested in unveils a childhood trauma and Adam's girlfriend confesses to dressing up as a superhero called the Scarlet Witch in order to share the obsession of a man she loved. The Scarlet Witch, as the narrator is all too aware, was married to the Vision. Not only has the narrator failed to embarrass his rival, but his pettiness and jealousy have been made known to all, including himself.

The drinking game conceit turns out to be emblematic of Lethem's method in these stories, which often start with some kind of gimmick. In the better stories, the high-concept ideas can turn in unexpected and sometimes dangerous directions, but in the lesser ones they act only in the service of a punch line. Such is the case in ''The Spray,'' where a couple come home to find their apartment robbed. The police arrive, equipped with a spray that reveals missing objects, including the stolen fax machine, jewelry box and television. When the cops leave a can of the stuff behind, the couple spray each other, only to reveal past lovers clinging to their bodies. Cute. Next!

''Vivian Relf'' begins with a false recognition: two singles at a party who think they recognize each other. ''Shadow and laughter spilled from the house above,'' Lethem writes, evoking the promise and mystery of the first moments of a party, ''while music shorn of all but its pulse made its way like ground fog across the eucalyptus-strewn lawn.'' After Vivian and Doran run through their biographies they realize that they could never have met; they part somewhat peevishly. Over the years, they continue to run into each other in different cities.

Doran, the male half of this failed union, broods on the meaning of these encounters and on the meaning of his life; by the end he has almost convinced himself, and the reader, of the significance of this accidental relationship, and of the fact that his inability to connect with Vivian Relf is emblematic of a lifelong pattern of emotional failure. Lethem's eye -- and ear -- for the banalities of the culture-producing classes at their leisure is particularly lethal here. ''So came the accustomed hurdles: the bottles opened and appreciated; the little dinner party geometries: No, but of course I know your name or If I'm not wrong your gallery represents my dear friend Zeus; the hard and runny cheeses and the bowl of aggravatingly addictive salted nuts.''

The most powerful story in the collection is ''Super Goat Man,'' with its deadpan evocation of the sad, shaggy, mediocre superhero next door. ''For us, as we ran and screamed and played secret games on the sidewalk,'' recalls the narrator, ''Super Goat Man was only another of the men who sat on stoops in sleeveless undershirts on hot summer days, watching the slow progress of life on the block.'' He was apparently banished from the imaginary world of comic books for becoming a political activist, and in fact the story can be read as an allegory of failed 60's radicals. And yet, Lethem seems to be attempting something more straightforward and implausible -- he wants to make him human. The decommissioned superhero keeps reappearing at the margins of the narrator's life, notably as a professor at his New Hampshire college, holder of the Walt Whitman Chair in the Humanities. It's a good joke -- the former superhero hardly raises an eyebrow on the New England campus. Just when we're starting to accept Super Goat Man as a plausible professor, a pair of drunken frat boys call upon him to demonstrate his super powers in an incident that is both farcical and tragic. Years later, when the narrator returns for a job interview at his old campus, he's forced yet again to confront his kinship with the old radical, crawling around on all fours now -- he is tolerated and even venerated as a sort of emeritus eccentric.

You can skip the final story in the collection, ''The National Anthem,'' which one can only hope is the work of a very young Jonathan Lethem trying to get a bad breakup out of his system. Slim as it is, the collection should end with ''Super Goat Man,'' which is in several respects a superconcentrated capsule version of ''The Fortress of Solitude.'' I found it such a powerful performance that I went back and reread the novel, which on a second reading overwhelmed my scruples about magic rings and flying derelicts with its accumulation of veridical detail, its indefatigable verbal energy and its geeky, nostalgic rock 'n' roll heart. (Actually, I have to confess, I didn't finish it the first time.) And for that I have to say -- thanks, Super Goat Man.